The Leelavati Prize 2026: A conversation with Hannah Fry
Hannah Fry, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, has been awarded the Leelavati Prize at this year's International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). The Leelavati Prize is awarded every four years by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) and Infosys for outstanding contributions for increasing public awareness of mathematics.
We interviewed her in the run-up to the ICM. You can also listen to the podcast of this interview here.
Plus: Hannah, congratulations on being awarded the Leelavati Prize for outstanding contributions to increasing public awareness of mathematics. The citation praises you for becoming a voice for mathematics that resonates far beyond the usual science communication audiences. How do you feel about receiving this honour?
Hannah Fry: It was a complete shock when it came through. As a mathematician, it feels as though there is no higher organisation than the International Mathematical Union to be recognised by. This is really the ultimate for me.
Plus: As a mathematician, what is it that you enjoy about communicating maths as opposed to—or alongside—doing research?
Hannah Fry: I think the two things are deeply connected. When you enjoy mathematics yourself, you have firsthand experience of its absolute joy—the twists and turns, the big reveals, the frustration, and the exhilaration. It provides a completely original way to see the world.
In the same way that you want to share anything in life you really enjoy, I just want to talk to people about maths. I honestly feel as though there are these wonderful secrets that are completely invisible to almost everybody in the world who isn't a mathematician. It doesn't make sense to keep them to ourselves. I feel like I've got a really good bit of gossip that I just want to share—that’s really why I want to do it.
Plus: You’ve said that the limitation isn't in people’s ability to comprehend maths, but what is important is getting them to care about it. When you're talking about applied mathematics, then you can make people care through the applications. But when it comes to pure mathematics, why should people care? Is its inherent beauty enough to get people passionate about it, even if it's a very abstract and pure thing?
Hannah Fry: I don't know if beauty alone is enough. I do think that amazing pure mathematics has an aesthetic quality parallel to art that can be mesmerising, but relying solely on beauty alone is difficult. Often, you have to get people to an extraordinary level of understanding before they can truly appreciate it. At that point, you struggle with people having a buy-in. Why would a person off the street sit through 30 minutes of you doing the preamble before you get to the beautiful bit? I think we all need the promise of a payoff.
However, pure mathematics has these really strange, extraordinary, amazing ideas that can get you to that moment much quicker. Oxford Mathematics put a video online of just a simple lecture – nothing fancy, no animations or anything – just a person holding a little round piece of card and a piece of paper with a hole in it. [You can see a version of the problem in this Numberphile video featuring Tadashi Tokieda.] And they show there's no way to get this piece of card through the paper. It just doesn't work, right?
Then he demonstrated how, if you fold it in a very specific way, you can slide it through. Millions and millions of people were amazed and enthralled by it, this mathematical idea about topology. What [the lecturer] was doing was saying: "Here is something that can't be done, and now let me show you why your expectation and your intuition is incorrect."
What you need to do is create a hole in people's imagination. If I can create just a moment where you want to know the next bit – you know exactly the size and shape it needs to be to fulfil your craving for that exact piece of information – then everybody's in.
Plus: You have said that once you start looking for patterns you can't stop, you see them everywhere. Do you think that mathematical appreciation could be more commonplace if there were a cultural shift in how we approach the subject?
Hannah Fry: Yes, I do think we have a big cultural problem with mathematics in general, in the UK, across Europe and America. We tend to believe it's an innate gift—you either have it or you don't. I've visited schools in South Korea, Singapore, or China, where they just don't have that attitude. They see it as, maths is difficult so of course you have to put in effort and legwork to appreciate it.
There was an experiment where they gave maths questions to students from around the world. When Western students were given an easy problem and asked if they wanted to do another, they said yes. But when a second group was given an impossible task first, almost all the students didn't want to do another one. When the experiment was repeated with Asian students, the number of kids who wanted to do another problem actually went up after getting the impossible task first. Their underlying attitude is that it's a question of effort, not that they don't belong or are defeated.
That's what I think the cultural difference is between us and elsewhere. And as a result people suffer genuine trauma from the maths they couldn't do at school and recoil in horror when they see something labelled as maths.
I almost never use the word "maths"—deliberately and intentionally. If people know I'm a mathematician then they know what I'm telling them is maths. But if you start off by saying – "Okay everybody, maths is fine" – you're telling, not showing. You cannot in one sentence undo an entire lifetime, an entire culture that is working against you.
Plus: Looking inwards towards the mathematical community, the Leelavati Prize was established relatively recently in 2010. How do you feel the attitude among mathematicians towards public engagement has changed?
Hannah Fry: I think that Cambridge appointing me as their first Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics demonstrates a strong positive step, indicative of the directions things are moving.
The world is different to what it used to be. When I finished my PhD around 2010, there was still a lot of snobbiness about it. A professor who taught me as an undergraduate once told me, "The world fears mathematicians, Hannah. Let's keep it that way."
But at the moment we see mathematics departments closing around the country and pure maths funding becoming extremely difficult. I think all of this is connected. All of this stems from appreciation – really understanding what it means to have a mathematically literate society and what economic and cultural value that adds for everybody, not just the people who are doing the maths.
I worry about maths department closures because the best school teachers aren't necessarily the ones who went to the universities with the highest research performance. The best teachers are the ones who absolutely adore mathematics and also understand that not everyone gets it straight away. You can't persuade Members of Parliament and others to care about this stuff retrospectively. They need to feel the value of maths in their bones. I don't think we can fix this in one generation but I want to leave the Earth having moved the dial a tiny bit.
Plus: People often view mathematics as a solitary pursuit for isolated geniuses, yet many top prize winners emphasize the importance of teamwork. Is collaboration central to your work as well?
Hannah Fry: My whole life is collaboration—I don't do anything on my own. Even for simple social media videos, I work with someone to bounce ideas around and edit.
This comes back to what we were saying before, the whole image of the subject is entirely wrong. I can't think of another subject where's there's such a gigantic difference between what people imagine mathematics is and what it actually is.
Being at Cambridge was a delightful surprise because it is built around collaboration – even down to its college system. It all comes down to people – that their collaboration is absolutely central to everything.
Plus: Do you have a favorite moment from your work in maths communication?
Hannah Fry: Yes, I do! When I gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 2019, I wanted to demonstrate how counterintuitive Bayes' theorem can be in a tangible way that immediately made sense to everybody. How do we make people care?
So I came up with this idea of a big bag of 100 wrapped presents – we wheeled them out on a trolley and it looked really cool. And I told people there are five new phones in there, and the rest are satsumas or socks and we're going to help them find the phones.
To help the audience find the phones, I summoned a present-scanning machine – which was actually Matt Parker and a person hiding inside a box throwing presents out. Matt played a lovable buffoon who was very proud of his machine being 80% accurate. Surely it should be able to help?
But as the process went on, Matt and the "machine" were chucking presents out, the numbers started coming out wrong and didn't add up. Every kid in the audience is shouting, "Which one's a phone?!" They are completely motivated and desperate to know why an 80% accurate machine was producing strange results.
It took days of writing and rehearsals, but it became the best explanation of Bayes' theorem I've ever done. I still feel really, really proud about it. If I had just put the equation up on a board or worked through an example, no one would have cared or remembered it. You have to make people care so that mathematics feels like the key that unlocks a story they are desperate to find out about.
About this article
Hannah Fry is Professor for the Public Understanding of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
Marianne Freiberger and Rachel Thomas are the Editors of Plus. They spoke to Fry in the run-up to the ICM. This article is an edited transcript of their conversation – you can also listen to the podcast in full here.
This content was produced as part of the collaboration between plus.maths.org and the London Mathematical Society and with kind support of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.
